If you would have told young Della Wells she’d be an artist, she would have laughed. The native Milwaukeean has always been creatively inclined, but she didn’t feel like she had something important to say with her art until relatively recently. “I’ve been interested in storytelling since I was young, but I didn’t find my artist’s voice until much later,” says Wells.

Kimberly Kane grew up in a world of social impact. After her dad left a marketing career to start a gang prevention program in Los Angeles, he commonly posed the same question to the family: “Why do the media always reach out to me for commentary when there are problems instead of focusing on the solutions people are creating?” “I thought, as a youngster, maybe that’s the kind of work I can do,” says Kane.

Growing up, Kristina Ropella always liked math and science. When Ropella was looking at colleges, her mom brought home a brochure for Marquette University’s biomedical engineering program. Ropella was hooked. The summer after her junior year at Marquette, she interned at a company that produced medical electronic equipment. “I really enjoyed working side by side with physicians thinking about how to use technology to make health care better for people,” Ropella says.

In spring 2020, stay-at-home mom Meagan Johnson was leading a new parent circle at a local community center and teaching a class about cloth diapering. Researching the history of diapering for her class, she came across a statistic that shaped the course of her own future, and that of her city’s. “I learned that 1 in 3 American families struggled to afford diapers, and as a mom of two boys in diapers at the time, that broke my heart,” Johnson says, noting that a more recent study found that the number is actually closer to 1 in 2.

Tenacity is in Gabriela Parra’s DNA. At eight months pregnant, her mother crossed the border from Mexico, landing in Los Angeles, to give her family a better life. Until her teen years, Parra grew up in a humble neighborhood, where many of her peers dropped out of school and joined gangs. “By middle school, I was hanging out with gang members, but deep down, I knew there was a greater calling for me,” she says.

That Ann Merkow, medical director of QuadMed, would make her mark in the field of health care shouldn’t come as a surprise. Her father, whose family emigrated from Slovakia to Milwaukee, was a beloved internal medicine physician at Waukesha Memorial Hospital, and her mother worked as a nurse.